Audiobook · read by volunteers
May Day
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Banlon1964, Deborah Stafford, Kathy Thile, Fox in the Stars, Westwinds12 · 6 chapters · 5 min
About the book
Spring has come, and Sara Teasdale greets it with a poem in which every line hums. May Day is a short, light and joyful lyric, full of rhythm, in which the poet seems to dance through the season's first warm days. To celebrate the first of May, LibriVox volunteers recorded six different readings, and the collection was the weekly poetry project for the week of 30 April 2006. Each reader brings a different tempo and sense of play to the poem, and listening to them in turn is a bright little tour of the possibilities of a single text. The whole set lasts only a few minutes, making it a small and cheerful gift for a spring morning.
Introduction
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American poet born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her poems are mostly short lyrics on love, nature and loneliness, written in clear language and a tuneful style. She was widely read in the early twentieth century, and in 1918 she received the award that later became the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collection Love Songs.
May Day appears in her collection Flame and Shadow, published in 1920. It is a spirited poem welcoming the arrival of spring, and its movement is lively, with lines that seem to skip along. Teasdale often wrote about the beauty of ordinary things and the passing of time, but here the mood is exuberant. The poem has been included in a number of anthologies and is a good example of her gift for musical language.
This recording comes from a LibriVox weekly poetry project and contains six versions of the poem, each read by a different volunteer, among them Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Banlon1964 and Deborah Stafford. The version titles are marked with the readers' initials. The collection runs for about six minutes. It is a lovely way to meet Teasdale for the first time, and a lively demonstration of how much personality a voice can bring to a poem of just a few lines. The poem is brief and bright, with a sense of play that is easy to enjoy at once. Hearing six readers take on the same short text is a pleasure for anyone who loves the way poetry changes from voice to voice, and it is a small celebration of spring and of the volunteers who made it.
Public domain
Sara Teasdale died in 1933: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text